Turn 107 - Second Man on the 20 & 25

 Tuesday this week and we are still in the middle of the heatwave; apparently Norfolk Fire & Rescue had over 700 calls, and our neighbours barley is not yet harvested so we are morally bound to keep the diesel-only service running. Driver Stuart and I expected to be rostered to the Class 25, but showed up at Weybourne to find that we were down for the 20 and the 25 was already being prepped by the other crew...

She's a fine machine, with a good view out of the back; less so from the front, as I mentioned last time. Apparently, when these are run in multiple (which they often are, since they are only 1000 bhp (Type 1) locos) they are run nose to nose, so you can see out of both ends.

Here's both of the locos waiting for the day's service to begin. At this point, the RO appeared asking why us crews were on the wrong locos - apparently we were supposed to have the 25 after all, to do with one of the driver's needing to get his competency ticket signed off...

We agreed to swap part way through the day, on the second down trip.

When the time came to swap, we jumped off at Weybourne and went to claim our new loco in platform 1, for the third up trip. Driver Tony, from the 25, told us all was well but there was a bit of a diesel leak.

We stopped for a look at Holt.

And boy was there a diesel leak. With the injector covers off, two of the feed hoses had a total of five pin holes which were busily spraying diesel between them - something we found when we re-started the engine to pressurise the fuel header.

I called the duty fitter, spoke to guard to warn him we had a problem and we made our way to Weybourne. You can switch the injectors off individually, but there was no point - the feed hoses would still be pressurised and would still leak...

Duty Fitter Alex was well prepared, with three new hoses in his locker:

It took him five minutes to change out the hoses - he was ready waiting for us with the parts and the spanners:

And we were on our merry way again, less than five minutes late. Better than a Formula 1 pit crew!

The 25 has a sumptuous cabin compared to the 20, which I made use of when I drove it, Light Engine, back to shed after our service was finished.

Another cracking day out on the North Norfolk Railway.